Noun
former genus of primitive apelike men now Homo erectus
Source: WordNetShortly after pithecanthropus erectus gained the ascendancy, he turned his attention to the higher-order abstractions. Richard Arnold Epstein
Bones of Contention: Controversies in the Search for Human Origins, British science writer Roger Lewin suggests the tone was set by the Dutch anatomist Eugène Dubois, who in the 1890s found remains of Pithecanthropus erectus) on the island of Java. Source: Internet